Famous Quotes & Sayings

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 23 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Kwame Anthony Appiah.

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Famous Quotes By Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes 1736615

If someone hates you, they won't ask you for things. — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes 1162381

Once you start offering reasons for ignoring the interests of others, however, reasoning itself will usually draw you into a kind of universality. A reason is an offer of a ground for thinking or feeling or doing something. And it isn't a ground for me, unless it's a ground for you. If someone really thinks that some group of people genuinely doesn't matter at all, he will suppose they are outside the circle of those to whom justifications are due. — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes 1996474

In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you're playing — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes 1440509

The Romantic state could pride itself on being the emanation of one Volk and its primordial
consciousness; the liberal state has to get by with a good deal less magic. The Romantic state
could boldly identify itself with a people's Will; liberal states must content themselves with a
general willingness. The romantic state rallies its citizens with a stirring cry: "One people!"
The liberal state's true anthem is: "We can work it out. — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes 2032636

The challenge, then, is to take minds and hearts formed over the long millennia of living in local troops and equip them with ideas and institutions that will allow us to live together as the global tribe we have become. — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes 1904125

And that, as we've seen, seems consistent with our broader explanatory habits-with the observation that much of what
we say when we're explaining what we've done is confabulation: stories we've made up (though quite sincerely) for ourselves and in response to others. In short-to overstate the point only slightly-because people don't really know why they do what they do, they give explanations of their own behavior that are about as reliable as anyone else's, and in many circumstances actually less so.1a — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes 1766279

But it does not in general make sense to suppose that a legislature has an intent in passing a law. Legislation is a political process, in which deals are cut and compromises made. In both the public and the private deliberations about any statute many inconsistent reasons will be offered for framing a clause one way or another; many suggestions, not all of them consonant with one another, will be offered as to what the overall aims of the statute are. To extract from this mishmash of mixed motives a singular coherent intention will usually be impossible.46 — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes 1753554

It's important to understand that while honor is an entitlement to respect
and shame comes when you lose that title
a person of honor cares first of all not about being respected but about being worthy of respect. — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes 1694723

I am not alone is doubting the imperative to respect cultures, as opposed to persons; and I believe we can respect persons only inasmuch as we consider them as abstract rights-holders. — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes 1612023

Morality, on the other hand, as Immanuel Kant insisted, is ultimately practical: though it matters morally what we think and feel, morality is, at its heart, about what we do. — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes 1575520

I am urging that we should learn about people in other places, take an interest in their civilizations, their arguments, their errors, their achievements, not because that will bring us to agreement, but because it will help us get used to one another. — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes 1528251

A value is like a fax machine: it's not much use if you're the only one who has one. — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes 1510581

(And, like many philosophers, I am of the school that what goes without saying often goes even better with saying.) — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes 115014

In short - to overstate the point only slightly - because people don't really know why they do what they do, they give explanations of their own behavior that are about as reliable as anyone else's, and in many circumstances actually less so. — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes 1381816

The phrase 'academic freedom' is often used carelessly: here is a work that will allow a more careful conversation about those many crucial issues facing the academy, in which a well-worked out understanding of conceptions of academic freedom is, as its authors show, an essential tool. — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes 1348889

Possibly, there was something to be said for the intellectual discipline of second-guessing what you thought was true. — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes 1271626

Cultures are made of continuities and changes, and the identity of a society can survive through these changes. Societies without change aren't authentic; they're just dead — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes 981925

Yet in making our choices we must sometimes start with a vision, however inchoate, of what it is for a human life to go well. That was one of Aristotle's central insights. It is my argument that we should be free to avail ourselves of the resources of many disciplines to define that vision; and that in bringing them together we are being faithful to a long tradition. In the humanities,
I think, we are always engaged in illuminating the present by drawing on the past; it is the only way to make a future worth hoping for. — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes 624679

I started philosophy looking for answers. But along the way I came to prize exploring the questions. Progress in philosophy consists, I think, in a clearer delineation of the conceptual options, not in reaching determinate conclusions. — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes 539904

This is, of course, an easy Berlinian riposte. Start with some graceful hand waving about incommensurability; declare that nothing could reconcile these great goods; and (with a tip of trilby) commend liberal pluralism for living with the contradictions. — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes 225699

To create a life is to create a life out of the materials that history has given you. — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes 174910

Conversation doesn't have to lead to consensus about anything especially not values; it's enough that it helps people get used to one another — Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah Quotes 123740

The most reliable predictor of whether students liked a course, it turned out, was their answer to the question 'Did the professor respect you? — Kwame Anthony Appiah